1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a portable information terminal, and particularly to a portable information terminal in which symbols and pictograms of frequent use can be entered faster, thereby improving the operability.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, portable information equipment has been remarkably developed and popularized. In particular, mobile phones, although they have the limited number of entry keys, are enabled to enter letters and characters by using various methods, such as, by assigning plural characters to each key and then switching these plural types of characters, and by using the toggle method in which the characters assigned to each key is switched according to a number of key pressing.
In these methods, characters such as Japanese Kana characters, numeric, and alphabet characters are directly assigned to keys. These characters can be entered easily by pressing numeric keys on a character entry screen. However, the entry of symbols and pictograms requires a user to select his/her desired one from a list of symbols or a list of pictograms, for example, by using a character entry method as disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2003-122486.
Thus, according to such conventional character entry methods, every time the user wants to enter a symbol or pictogram, whether it is of frequent use or not, the user has to refer to a symbol list or pictogram list to select his/her desired one. Therefore, the operability is very poor.